Talk:Sumerian/Grammar/Lesson Five - The Verb Chain

Tonality in script
"Also, the Sumerian writing system, one might imagine, would have developed a way to capture tonality in the script, as has happened in most other tonal scripts."

I have no idea what this is supposed to mean. By the very fact that, say, du and du3 are distinguished in the script, tones (provided that the difference was tonal) are reflected in it. If, on the other hand, the author means that the script should designate the tones as such directly and predictably, that would have made it a phonetic script and not a logographic one. The only other logographic script for a tonal language that I can think of, the Chinese one, is certainly not phonetic in that way, as it does not have any special signs for the tones as such. Thai is not comparable, since its tones developed after the orthography had been established, and again it is not the tones but the historical tone-conditioning consonants that are expressed in the script. Other "tonal scripts" have mostly been created in modern times and are Latin-based - we can hardly be surprised that the Sumerian one is not like them.--91.148.159.4 (discuss) 18:27, 22 February 2011 (UTC)